2008 Cairo landslide

The 2008 Cairo landslide happened on September 6, 2008, at el-Deweika, an informal settlement in the Manshiyat Naser neighborhood of east Cairo, Egypt, 119 people died in the rockslide. Some people blamed for the landslide were arrested and held accountable. [1]

Boulders weighing as much as 70 tons rolled into the shantytown following the landslide,[2] after most of the neighborhood had been flattened, those families still living in the slum were evicted and any remaining buildings were flattened by the government.[2] As a result, hundreds of families were left homeless and many still live in squalor near the site of the disaster, despite government promises to find them homes.[3]

The cause of the landslide has not been definitively determined, but theories included leaked sewage from development projects that eroded rocks.[4][5] An internal investigation determined that the slide was caused by "fate" and no one would be blamed for it.[6]

Amnesty International reports that thousands of Egyptians still continue to live in unsafe slums.[3]

According to Amnesty International, authorities failed to evacuate the impoverished residents and provide them with temporary or alternative housing. People living in areas deemed unsafe in Al-Duwayqa and Ezbet Bekhit were forced out in a manner which breached the international standards that states must observe while carrying out evictions.[7]

In May 2010, a court found Mahmoud Yassin, a Cairo deputy governor, guilty of negligence and sentenced him for 5 years of imprisonment. Seven other officials were sentenced to 3 years each.[1]

1.
Manshiyat Naser
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Manshiyat Naser is a ward of Cairo, Egypt. It covers 5.54 square kilometers, home to 262,050 people in the 2006 census, and borders Nasr City to the east, central Cairo districts to the west, and Khalifa ward to the south. It is famous for the Garbage City quarter which is a settlement at the far southern end of Manshiyat Naser. Being Cairos largest concentration of Zabbaleen garbage collectors, its economy revolves around the collection, although Manshiyat Naser has streets, shops, and apartments as other areas of the city, it lacks infrastructure and often has no running water, sewers, or electricity. Coptic Christians were originally the predominant inhabitants of Manshiyat Naser, though in recent decades the areas Muslim population has grown, the Christians are well known for herding swine within the city, which are fed edible pieces of garbage and marketed across Cairo to Coptic Christian establishments. However, in the spring of 2009, the Egyptian government, in response to the threat of swine flu. The Cave Cathedral or St Samaans Church, used by the Coptic Christians in Garbage City, is the largest church in the Middle East, with seating for 15,000 people. The citys garbage is brought to the Garbage City in Manshiyat Naser by the Zabbaleen, as a passerby walks or drives down the road he will see large rooms stacked with garbage with men, women or children crouching and sorting the garbage into unsellable or sellable. Families typically specialize in a type of garbage they sort and sell — one room of children sorting out plastic bottles. Anything that can be reused or recycled is saved by one of the families in Manshiyat Naser. Various recycled paper and glass products are made and sold from the city, while metal is sold by the kilo to be melted down, carts pulled by horse or donkey are often stacked 2.5 to 3 m high with the recyclable goods. The economic system in the Garbage City is classified as the informal sector, most families typically have worked in the same area and type of specialization in the garbage piles and continue to make enough money to support themselves. City of the Dead 2008 Cairo landslide

2.
Cairo
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Cairo is the capital and largest city of Egypt. Cairo has long been a center of the political and cultural life. Cairo has the oldest and largest film and music industries in the Arab world, as well as the worlds second-oldest institution of higher learning, Al-Azhar University. Many international media, businesses, and organizations have regional headquarters in the city, with a population of 6.76 million spread over 453 square kilometers, Cairo is by far the largest city in Egypt. An additional 9.5 million inhabitants live in proximity to the city. Cairo, like many other mega-cities, suffers from high levels of pollution, Cairos metro, one of only two in Africa, ranks among the fifteen busiest in the world, with over 1 billion annual passenger rides. The economy of Cairo was ranked first in the Middle East in 2005, Egyptians often refer to Cairo as Maṣr, the Egyptian Arabic name for Egypt itself, emphasizing the citys importance for the country. In Coptic the city is known as Kahire, meaning Place of the Sun, possibly referring to the ancient city of Heliopolis, the location of the ancient city is the suburb of Ain Shams. The ancient Egyptian name for the area is thought to be Khere-Ohe, The Place of Combat, sometimes the city is informally referred to as Kayro. The area around present-day Cairo, especially Memphis, had long been a point of Ancient Egypt due to its strategic location just upstream from the Nile Delta. However, the origins of the city are generally traced back to a series of settlements in the first millennium. Around the turn of the 4th century, as Memphis was continuing to decline in importance and this fortress, known as Babylon, remained the nucleus of the Roman, and, later, the Byzantine, city and is the oldest structure in the city today. It is also situated at the nucleus of the Coptic Orthodox community, many of Cairos oldest Coptic churches, including the Hanging Church, are located along the fortress walls in a section of the city known as Coptic Cairo. Following the Muslim conquest in 640 AD the conqueror Amr ibn As settled to the north of the Babylon in an area became known as al-Fustat. Originally a tented camp Fustat became a permanent settlement and the first capital of Islamic Egypt, in 750, following the overthrow of the Ummayad caliphate by the Abbasids, the new rulers created their own settlement to the northeast of Fustat which became their capital. This was known as al-Askar as it was laid out like a military camp, a rebellion in 869 by Ahmad ibn Tulun led to the abandonment of Al Askar and the building of another settlement, which became the seat of government. This was al-Qattai, to the north of Fustat and closer to the river, Al Qattai was centred around a palace and ceremonial mosque, now known as the Mosque of ibn Tulun. In 905 the Abbasids re-asserted control of the country and their returned to Fustat

3.
Egypt
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Egypt, officially the Arab Republic of Egypt, is a transcontinental country spanning the northeast corner of Africa and southwest corner of Asia by a land bridge formed by the Sinai Peninsula. Egypt is a Mediterranean country bordered by the Gaza Strip and Israel to the northeast, the Gulf of Aqaba to the east, the Red Sea to the east and south, Sudan to the south, and Libya to the west. Across the Gulf of Aqaba lies Jordan, and across from the Sinai Peninsula lies Saudi Arabia, although Jordan and it is the worlds only contiguous Afrasian nation. Egypt has among the longest histories of any country, emerging as one of the worlds first nation states in the tenth millennium BC. Considered a cradle of civilisation, Ancient Egypt experienced some of the earliest developments of writing, agriculture, urbanisation, organised religion and central government. One of the earliest centres of Christianity, Egypt was Islamised in the century and remains a predominantly Muslim country. With over 92 million inhabitants, Egypt is the most populous country in North Africa and the Arab world, the third-most populous in Africa, and the fifteenth-most populous in the world. The great majority of its people live near the banks of the Nile River, an area of about 40,000 square kilometres, the large regions of the Sahara desert, which constitute most of Egypts territory, are sparsely inhabited. About half of Egypts residents live in areas, with most spread across the densely populated centres of greater Cairo, Alexandria. Modern Egypt is considered to be a regional and middle power, with significant cultural, political, and military influence in North Africa, the Middle East and the Muslim world. Egypts economy is one of the largest and most diversified in the Middle East, Egypt is a member of the United Nations, Non-Aligned Movement, Arab League, African Union, and Organisation of Islamic Cooperation. Miṣr is the Classical Quranic Arabic and modern name of Egypt. The name is of Semitic origin, directly cognate with other Semitic words for Egypt such as the Hebrew מִצְרַיִם‎, the oldest attestation of this name for Egypt is the Akkadian

4.
Amnesty International
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Amnesty International is a non-governmental organisation focused on human rights that claims to have over 7 million members and supporters around the world. The stated objective of the organisation is to research and generate action to prevent and end grave abuses of human rights. Amnesty International was founded in London in 1961, following the publication of the article The Forgotten Prisoners in The Observer on 28 May 1961, Amnesty draws attention to human rights abuses and campaigns for compliance with international laws and standards. It works to public opinion to put pressure on governments that let abuse take place. Amnesty considers capital punishment to be the ultimate, irreversible denial of human rights, the organisation was awarded the 1977 Nobel Peace Prize for its campaign against torture, and the United Nations Prize in the Field of Human Rights in 1978. Amnesty International was founded in London in July 1961 by English labour lawyer Peter Benenson, researchers have never traced the alleged newspaper article in question. In 1960, Portugal was ruled by the Estado Novo government of António de Oliveira Salazar, the government was authoritarian in nature and strongly anti-communist, suppressing enemies of the state as anti-Portuguese. The newspaper reader feels a sense of impotence. Yet if these feelings of disgust could be united into common action, Benenson worked with friend Eric Baker. It marked the launch of Appeal for Amnesty,1961, the aim of which was to mobilise public opinion, quickly and widely, in defence of these individuals, the Appeal for Amnesty was reprinted by a large number of international newspapers. In the same year, Benenson had a published, Persecution 1961. In July 1961 the leadership had decided that the appeal would form the basis of a permanent organisation, Amnesty, Benenson ensured that all three major political parties were represented, enlisting members of parliament from the Labour Party, the Conservative Party, and the Liberal Party. On 30 September 1962, it was officially named Amnesty International, between the Appeal for Amnesty,1961 and September 1962 the organisation had been known simply as Amnesty. From the very beginning, research and campaigning were present in Amnesty Internationals work, a library was established for information about prisoners of conscience and a network of local groups, called THREES groups, was started. Each group worked on behalf of three prisoners, one each of the then three main ideological regions of the world, communist, capitalist and developing. The international movement was starting to agree on its principles and techniques. In 1967 Peter Benenson resigned after an independent inquiry did not support his claims that AI had been infiltrated by British agents, later he claimed that the Central Intelligence Agency had become involved in Amnesty. Leading Amnesty International in the 1970s were key figures Seán MacBride, Amnesty International believed that the reasons underlying torture of prisoners by governments, were either to acquire and obtain information or to quell opposition by the use of terror, or both

5.
Wayback Machine
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The Internet Archive launched the Wayback Machine in October 2001. It was set up by Brewster Kahle and Bruce Gilliat, and is maintained with content from Alexa Internet, the service enables users to see archived versions of web pages across time, which the archive calls a three dimensional index. Since 1996, the Wayback Machine has been archiving cached pages of websites onto its large cluster of Linux nodes and it revisits sites every few weeks or months and archives a new version. Sites can also be captured on the fly by visitors who enter the sites URL into a search box, the intent is to capture and archive content that otherwise would be lost whenever a site is changed or closed down. The overall vision of the machines creators is to archive the entire Internet, the name Wayback Machine was chosen as a reference to the WABAC machine, a time-traveling device used by the characters Mr. Peabody and Sherman in The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show, an animated cartoon. These crawlers also respect the robots exclusion standard for websites whose owners opt for them not to appear in search results or be cached, to overcome inconsistencies in partially cached websites, Archive-It. Information had been kept on digital tape for five years, with Kahle occasionally allowing researchers, when the archive reached its fifth anniversary, it was unveiled and opened to the public in a ceremony at the University of California, Berkeley. Snapshots usually become more than six months after they are archived or, in some cases, even later. The frequency of snapshots is variable, so not all tracked website updates are recorded, Sometimes there are intervals of several weeks or years between snapshots. After August 2008 sites had to be listed on the Open Directory in order to be included. As of 2009, the Wayback Machine contained approximately three petabytes of data and was growing at a rate of 100 terabytes each month, the growth rate reported in 2003 was 12 terabytes/month, the data is stored on PetaBox rack systems manufactured by Capricorn Technologies. In 2009, the Internet Archive migrated its customized storage architecture to Sun Open Storage, in 2011 a new, improved version of the Wayback Machine, with an updated interface and fresher index of archived content, was made available for public testing. The index driving the classic Wayback Machine only has a bit of material past 2008. In January 2013, the company announced a ground-breaking milestone of 240 billion URLs, in October 2013, the company announced the Save a Page feature which allows any Internet user to archive the contents of a URL. This became a threat of abuse by the service for hosting malicious binaries, as of December 2014, the Wayback Machine contained almost nine petabytes of data and was growing at a rate of about 20 terabytes each week. Between October 2013 and March 2015 the websites global Alexa rank changed from 162 to 208, in a 2009 case, Netbula, LLC v. Chordiant Software Inc. defendant Chordiant filed a motion to compel Netbula to disable the robots. Netbula objected to the motion on the ground that defendants were asking to alter Netbulas website, in an October 2004 case, Telewizja Polska USA, Inc. v. Echostar Satellite, No.02 C3293,65 Fed. 673, a litigant attempted to use the Wayback Machine archives as a source of admissible evidence, Telewizja Polska is the provider of TVP Polonia and EchoStar operates the Dish Network

6.
Geographic coordinate system
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A geographic coordinate system is a coordinate system used in geography that enables every location on Earth to be specified by a set of numbers, letters or symbols. The coordinates are chosen such that one of the numbers represents a vertical position. A common choice of coordinates is latitude, longitude and elevation, to specify a location on a two-dimensional map requires a map projection. The invention of a coordinate system is generally credited to Eratosthenes of Cyrene. Ptolemy credited him with the adoption of longitude and latitude. Ptolemys 2nd-century Geography used the prime meridian but measured latitude from the equator instead. Mathematical cartography resumed in Europe following Maximus Planudes recovery of Ptolemys text a little before 1300, in 1884, the United States hosted the International Meridian Conference, attended by representatives from twenty-five nations. Twenty-two of them agreed to adopt the longitude of the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, the Dominican Republic voted against the motion, while France and Brazil abstained. France adopted Greenwich Mean Time in place of local determinations by the Paris Observatory in 1911, the latitude of a point on Earths surface is the angle between the equatorial plane and the straight line that passes through that point and through the center of the Earth. Lines joining points of the same latitude trace circles on the surface of Earth called parallels, as they are parallel to the equator, the north pole is 90° N, the south pole is 90° S. The 0° parallel of latitude is designated the equator, the plane of all geographic coordinate systems. The equator divides the globe into Northern and Southern Hemispheres, the longitude of a point on Earths surface is the angle east or west of a reference meridian to another meridian that passes through that point. All meridians are halves of great ellipses, which converge at the north and south poles, the prime meridian determines the proper Eastern and Western Hemispheres, although maps often divide these hemispheres further west in order to keep the Old World on a single side. The antipodal meridian of Greenwich is both 180°W and 180°E, the combination of these two components specifies the position of any location on the surface of Earth, without consideration of altitude or depth. The grid formed by lines of latitude and longitude is known as a graticule, the origin/zero point of this system is located in the Gulf of Guinea about 625 km south of Tema, Ghana. To completely specify a location of a feature on, in, or above Earth. Earth is not a sphere, but a shape approximating a biaxial ellipsoid. It is nearly spherical, but has an equatorial bulge making the radius at the equator about 0. 3% larger than the radius measured through the poles, the shorter axis approximately coincides with the axis of rotation

7.
Emergency management
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Disaster management is the creation of plans through which communities reduce vulnerability to hazards and cope with disasters. Disaster management does not avert or eliminate the threats, instead, failure to create a plan could lead to human mortality, lost revenue, and damage to assets. Events covered by disaster management include acts of terrorism, industrial sabotage, fire, natural disasters, public disorder, industrial accidents, and communication failures. If possible, emergency planning should aim to prevent emergencies from occurring, as time goes on, and more data becomes available, usually through the study of emergencies as they occur, a plan should evolve. There are very few Emergency Management specific standards, and emergency management as a discipline tends to fall under business resilience standards. In order to avoid, or reduce significant losses to a business, emergency managers should work to identify and anticipate potential risks, hopefully to reduce their probability of occurring. It is essential for an organisation to include procedures for determining whether a situation has occurred. An emergency plan must be maintained, in a structured and methodical manner. Emergency managers generally follow a process to anticipate, assess, prevent, prepare, respond. Emergency management plans and procedures should include the identification of appropriately trained staff members responsible for decision-making when an emergency occurs, Training plans should include internal people, contractors and civil protection partners, and should state the nature and frequency of training and testing. Testing of a plans effectiveness should occur regularly, in instances where several business or organisations occupy the same space, joint emergency plans, formally agreed to by all parties, should be put into place. Communication is one of the key issues during any emergency, pre-planning of communications is critical, miscommunication can easily result in emergency events escalating unnecessarily. Once an emergency has been identified a comprehensive assessment evaluating the level of impact, following assessment, the appropriate plan or response to be activated will depend on a specific pre-set criteria within the emergency plan. The steps necessary should be prioritized to ensure critical functions are operational as soon as possible, the critical functions are those that makes the plan untenable if not operationalized. The Communication policy must be known and rehearsed and all targeted audiences or publics. All Communication infrastructure must be as prepared as possible with all information on groupings clearly identified, Emergency management consists of five phases, prevention, mitigation, preparedness, response and recovery. Http, //www. fema. gov/mission-areas It focuses on preventing the human hazard, preventive measures are taken on both the domestic and international levels, designed to provide permanent protection from disasters. Not all disasters, particularly natural disasters, can be prevented, in January 2005,167 Governments adopted a 10-year global plan for natural disaster risk reduction called the Hyogo Framework

8.
Disaster
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In contemporary academia, disasters are seen as the consequence of inappropriately managed risk. These risks are the product of a combination of both hazards and vulnerability, hazards that strike in areas with low vulnerability will never become disasters, as in the case of uninhabited regions. The word disaster is derived from Middle French désastre and that from Old Italian disastro, the root of the word disaster comes from an astrological sense of a calamity blamed on the position of planets. Researchers have been studying disasters for more than a century, all disasters are hence the result of human failure to introduce appropriate disaster management measures. Hazards are routinely divided into natural or human-made, although complex disasters, a specific disaster may spawn a secondary disaster that increases the impact. A classic example is an earthquake causes a tsunami, resulting in coastal flooding. However, the growth of the worlds population and its increased concentration often in hazardous environments has escalated both the frequency and severity of disasters. Asia tops the list of casualties caused by natural hazards, human-instigated disasters are the consequence of technological hazards. Examples include stampedes, fires, transport accidents, industrial accidents, oil spills, war and deliberate attacks may also be put in this category. As with natural hazards, man-made hazards are events that have not happened—for instance, man-made disasters are examples of specific cases where man-made hazards have become reality in an event

9.
History of Egypt
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The history of Egypt has been long and rich, due to the flow of the Nile river, with its fertile banks and delta. Its rich history also comes from its inhabitants and outside influence. Much of Egypts ancient history was a mystery until the secrets of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs were deciphered with the discovery, the Great Pyramid of Giza is the only one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World still standing. The Lighthouse of Alexandria, one of the other Seven Wonders, is gone, the Library of Alexandria was the only one of its kind for centuries. Human settlement in Egypt dates back to at least 40,000 BC with Aterian tool manufacturing, Ancient Egyptian civilization coalesced around 3150 BC with the political unification of Upper and Lower Egypt under the first pharaoh of the First Dynasty, Narmer. Predominately native Egyptian rule lasted until the conquest by the Achaemenid Empire in the sixth century BC, the Ptolemies had to fight native rebellions and were involved in foreign and civil wars that led to the decline of the kingdom and its final annexation by Rome. The death of Cleopatra ended the independence of Egypt resulting in Egypt becoming one of the provinces of the Roman Empire. Roman rule in Egypt lasted from 30 BC to 641 AD, in 1517, Ottoman sultan Selim I captured Cairo, absorbing Egypt into the Ottoman Empire. Egypt remained entirely Ottoman until 1867, except during French occupation from 1798 to 1801, starting in 1867, Egypt became a nominally autonomous tributary state called the Khedivate of Egypt. However, Khedivate Egypt fell under British control in 1882 following the Anglo-Egyptian War, after the end of World War I and following the Egyptian revolution of 1919, the Kingdom of Egypt was established. While a de facto independent state, the United Kingdom retained control over affairs, defense. British occupation lasted until 1954, with the Anglo-Egyptian agreement of 1954, President Gamal Abdel Nasser introduced many reforms and created the short-lived United Arab Republic. His terms also saw the Six-Day War and the creation of the international Non-Aligned Movement and he led Egypt in the Yom Kippur War of 1973 to regain Egypts Sinai Peninsula, which Israel had occupied since the Six-Day War of 1967. This later led to the Egypt–Israel Peace Treaty, recent Egyptian history has been dominated by events following nearly thirty years of rule by former president Hosni Mubarak. The Egyptian revolution of 2011 deposed Mubarak and resulted in the first democratically elected president in Egyptian history, unrest after the 2011 revolution and related disputes led to the 2013 Egyptian coup détat. There is evidence of petroglyphs along the Nile terraces and in desert oases, in the 10th millennium BC, a culture of hunter-gatherers and fishermen was replaced by a grain-grinding culture. Climate changes and/or overgrazing around 6000 BC began to desiccate the pastoral lands of Egypt, early tribal peoples migrated to the Nile River, where they developed a settled agricultural economy and more centralized society. By about 6000 BC, a Neolithic culture rooted in the Nile Valley, during the Neolithic era, several predynastic cultures developed independently in Upper and Lower Egypt